Thinking About Football

1.

When you say "football" here, in America, what people around you think of, as long as they're fellow Americans, is either the NFL or the college version of American football. If you're in Calgary or Winnipeg and mention "football", people there understand you to mean a game we call Canadian football. If you mention "footy" in Australia, they assume you're talking about what we call Australian rules football. In London, "footy" or "football" means a game we usually call soccer.

In Dublin, the highest attended sporting event is football, but not soccer, rather, a game known outside of Ireland as Gaelic football.

An interesting thing about the term "football": in as many places as have unique games using a ball and feet in some capacity all colloquially refer to their game as simply football. 

America, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and England all have games that the locals call football, and all are different from each other. Is anyone more right than anyone else?

2.

Skipping the thousands of years of history of indigenous peoples use of games as battle practice would do a disservice to this discussion. But, a thorough discussion of those peoples and their games would take too much time. 

Believe me, almost all groups of native peoples throughout human history had games of some kind, many used primarily to keep young warriors fit and teach them coordination and teamwork, things that would help out in the eventual battles they'd end up in. Many of these games used a sphere of dense vegetation or and inflated animal bladder as the "ball".

It was this background of mobbed-sporting-event that we'll move this discussion to Europe, and, specifically, England.

3.

In Medieval England tiny villages would have game contests during major holidays. They started halfway between the towns with an unlimited number of participants ("players"), and the winner was the town that could move the inflated bladder-ball to the opposing town's abbey or church.

This "mob-ball" game was the basis for all our games today that bear the name football. In those contests, people were allowed to pitch the ball, kick it, advance it in someway that wasn't directly carrying it and running. People had loads of fun, and not too many were gravely injured.

4.

In the mid 1500s, students of the affluent and aristocratic classes went to schools instead of to work, like their poorer counterparts, in places we today "English public schools" that were in fact what we'd understand as being private schools.

As early as then, these institutions were trying to find ways to keep the kids fit and in shape, and teach them teamwork and cooperation. It was over the next two centuries that it's understood that these schools turned "mob-ball" from a day long playful battle into an organized sporting event.

The thing was, each school developed their own game (a few of which still exist). Almost all of these schools called their game football.

An interesting thing about the development of these games is their development through their limitations. For schools that had large amounts of open space, a carrying type of football game developed, where an oblong ball could be carried by hand and passed by foot, and tumbling and tackling could take place. One school that had this kind of game develop was named Rugby. 

Other schools that had less space to develop their games tended towards a kicking type of game, with less emphasis on tumbling, tackling, and holding the ball with your hands.

When rail travel made traveling easier, schools would travel and play opposing schools, playing one half of the game using one school's football rules, and the second half using the other's.

5.

In America, two specific years revolutionized the game we call football, and they involved rule changes. The first was 1880. That was the year that the Yale coach was able to implement rule changes to the version of Canadian rugby they played and convinced the schools they played against to switch as well. Not everybody switched right away, but they all ended up on the same page eventually.

Those rule changes? The establishment of a line of scrimmage and a set of downs to advance the ball a set distance before turning it over changed the strategy immensely. Now that the action stopped between advancing the ball, the game started to resemble its continuous-play rugby basis less and less. This development also started the evolution of scripted plays, something up until then was unknown.

In the football that's world known and beloved, known as Association Football, or soccer, scripted plays are reduced to set-plays like the corner kick, or the long free-kick.

The other year that made American football resemble what we see today was 1905, when the game was almost outlawed and the rules were changed to reduce violence. They made legal the play we call a "forward pass", they changed first down from 5 yards to 10, and lastly they changed the number of downs to make the yardage from 3 to 4.

A forward pass is still an illegal play in both kinds of rugby, our football's most obvious ancestor.

If you think football is violent now (it is, very much so), you should have seen it in 1905. There were some years when more than 50 players died on the field, and nearly 200 were seriously injured, like life-altering injuries. It's no surprise that they were talking about outlawing it. They were talking about making it safer then, as they are now. Nowadays, of course, the problem is brain injuries and long-term concussion issues.

6.

Canadian football is one of the three North American styles of "gridiron football". They use a different size ball than the NFL (and NCAA), they use a 110 yard field (instead of 100 for NFL), they retain the 3-down setup instead of the NFL's 4-down, and there's no limit to pre-snap motions on their backs on offense. That's a lot of words talking about the differences, but Canadian football is very similar to NFL and NCAA.

College football in America is different from the NFL, but not terribly. 

Gaelic football, the most popular football game in Ireland, is an amateur sport that resembles soccer and basketball, with players running down a field dribbling the ball like a basketball with their feet. It's hard tio explain, but fun to watch and easy to grasp what's going on.

Aussie rules football is played on a large oval, and the point is to kick the ball through uprights, or run it in; both plays have different point totals. It's exciting to watch, but takes a few minutes to tell why people hand over the ball after certain plays, and why certain players can't run, or can run...it's cool, though.

Rugby is split into two versions, and they resemble each other even if they're further apart than the NFL and NCAA. Rugby is the great-granddaddy of all grid-iron style football games, as well as those variations that use oblong balls and hands as well as feet (Aussie rules and Gaelic, et al). It is exciting, and as an American, I can see how the development of our football evolved through simple rule changes.

Association football is the world's most popular team sport. Soccer, baby!

7.

Happy Turkey Day! Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday in the Oct-Nov-Dec-New Years holiday season. As a harvest celebration, the basis is that the earth is giving gifts to you.

And a tradition here is to have our football on in the background--or foreground--during the Thursday itself. 

Not for everybody, of course, but I hope all have a nice few days, celebrating the great American pagan harvest festival.

I Dreamt I was a Condor

1.

Soaring above the coastline, circling and circling, hoping to find some kind of grub, some carcass to get into is all I really remember. The soaring. Maybe I dreamt I was a condor's beak. That seems like a more visceral thing, doesn't it? The hooking razor sharpness tells us all we need to know about this Pleistocene relic.

The California Condor is that which I speak. This ancient scavenger once roamed the skies of the last major glaciation with impunity, back when the megafauna was plentiful and dying regularly. Many of the aboriginal California tribes have their own stories about the condor. The Wiyot believed the condor recreated mankind after the Above Old Man wiped us out with a flood. The Chumash believed the condor was originally white, but turned black by flying to close to fire. Images of condors adorn ancient cave paintings and bones have been found buried with folks.

You can imagine how many people have dreamed of being this great flying beast.

2.

We were driving home from the Salton Sea, taking a scenic route, and traveled through the Anza-Borrego State Park. It's a beautiful spot in a varied state; desert to one side and the coastal range on the other, a little mix of both nestled between bodies of water.

We stopped in at a place to look for books; Corrie got a kids book and I picked up Willie Boy, a story of the last great posse manhunt of the dying old west of 1909. We got to talking with the older ladies at the shop, and they handed us all sorts of newsletters about the park full of various odd and/or important info: when the wild-flowers bloom; how to track coyotes; brief history about the Basque settler Anza, one of the park's namesakes; and about the repatriation of the California condor. They had a picture.

Is that...is that what one of these famous giant birds looks like?

As a kid growing up in California in the 1980s, I remember the hubbub that was stirred when in 1987, the decision was made to remove the condor from the wild---they were down to something like 19 specimens---and start a captive breeding program in the hopes of returning these majestic bastards to their perch as an apex scavenger. If such a thing exists.

Later on that day, after making it home, we were unwinding after dinner and watched an instant queue documentary from Netflix on Big Sur. The condor was a star of that show as well, and the focus was on the reintroduced population's troubles on the coastal scene.

Again, is that what these birds look like? I guess so.

3.

You'd be upset too if you had a ball-sack for a chin:

Seriously, have you ever seen one of these guys up close like this before? I thought I had, but I'd imagine I would have remembered scrotum-chin bird.

4.

One of the issues facing the California condor is biological. One thing about being a Pleistocene relic is that, well, advances have come along in other species that compete with you for resources that may be prove to be favored in the current setup of nature.

In other, less confusing phrasing, turkey vultures are proving to be biologically superior at finding carrion. Granted, the girth of the condor---if they can find some food, they'll scare most everybody away (except, of course, a hungry golden eagle--badgers won't even scare them) gives it an occasional advantage, but it may be to little too late. And that's when the condor can find food.

California condors have no sense of smell. They search for carrion using their great eye sight. This probably works better in the less cloudy interior of the deserts when the dead animals were huge, or on sunny beach days when the whales were plentiful, dying regularly and washing up onshore. Turkey vultures, on the other hand, can smell molecules of carrion from miles away.

Chalk that battle up to the turkey vulture.

5.

I remember these birds as being just huge, simply gigantic, the biggest birds on the planet.

Well, not really. That's one of those growing-up-in-80s-California false notions I developed.

Obviously there are the flightless birds: ostrich, emus, cassowaries, and penguins being the most famous editions. I had to look up cassowaries. If you can imagine a kiwi bird, that's like the smallest type of cassowary; the biggest ones are heavier than emus but shorter than the ostrich. Without flying, these large birds were able to develop great sizes, and even dense, marrow filled bones.

Okay, so, what about flying birds, right? The condor's wingspan is one of the biggest, clocking in at close to ten feet, and they're pretty fat too, weighing in at an average of 26 pounds.

It turns out there are some flying giants out there. The Dalmatian pelican is the heaviest on average bird that flies, something like 40 pounds, with a wingspan of 10 to 11 feet. Then there's the trumpeter swan. This is generally considered the biggest flying bird. It's six feet long, averages in the upper 30s in pounds, and has a 10 foot wingspan. There was a reported trumpeter that weighed fifty pounds and couldn't fly.

Wingspan wise the biggest is the wandering albatross. These guys look like sea gulls to me, but probably because I've never seen one up close. They have 12 foot wings. Twelve-fucking-feet.

Let's not forget the whooping crane. The whooper is the tallest flying bird, standing at a majestic five feet. (Soft spot for these birds from Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.)

So flightless birds, pelicans, swans, albatrosses, and the whooper all have some kind of claim to being slightly more giant in some way than our giant scavenger (with a scrotum as a facial feature), but one thing I found that seemed to top out in favor of this condor: age.

I couldn't find a bird with an average longer lifespan. Maybe a parrot? California condors live for an average of sixty years.

6.

Sixty years with a ball sack for a chin. And not even a mammoth to mack. Yeesh. See, even if you have a nut-sack on your face, if that face is buried in a mammoth, or a dead saber-toothed tiger, then your ass is dignified.

Yup, dignity comes to those who eat rotting mammoth and saber-tooth tiger corpses.

7.

Vultures are one of the three types of technical Birds of Prey.

I sometimes walk to the beach and watch the pelicans dive bomb fish. Yet they're not considered a Bird of Prey, with the capital letters of an official title. Ditto for penguins, who hunt fish nearly every day of their lives.

Official Birds of Prey are broken up into three groups, and scavenging vultures make up one. They developed from an early break with another group of surprise hunters. That seems to be the official criteria: swoop-surprise hunting.

The other two groups are the raptors and the owls.

Owls, raptors, and carrion vultures.

8.

Scoring one for the repatriation efforts: the condors are up over 400 specimens on the planet, I think it's at 419, with under 200 in captivity and over 200 wild. Strange fact: to be lifted from the "Critically Endangered" list to the plain "Endangered" list, which itself would be a coup of sorts, they just need to get to 450 birds.

Well, before us science types go congratulating ourselves, I should probably say that the baby condors growing up in captivity have a very hard time successfully scavenging on their own once repatriated, as they tend to be "taught" by their human overlords.

Also, maybe this animal's design is a relic for a reason, and the fact its time of this rock is limited is not necessarily a tragedy as much as an essential characteristic.

9.

After the Big Sur documentary ended and Corrie went to bed, I started doing some research on condors. Thinking about them for a few solid hours, and then once asleep, playing around in the quantum dream land, I was freed from the shackles terrestrial travel, and soaring above the coast.

The sky above was blue, and the crashing waves below were quiet at that height, their salty violence betrayed by the altitude. Around and around I circled, and soon I think I realized I might have been just the beak.

The sharp and powerful beak of a Pleistocene relic...

I Dreamt I was a Condor's Beak

A Victory for Monsanto in California

Ugh...Monsanto spent twenty-six million dollars well enough to defeat the GMO food labeling initiative here in California. They paid off every politician in the state to go on television and complain that the proposition was flawed and sure to bring death and destruction onto the heads of every person in the state. Even Diane "time to move on to a younger set of Dems" Feinsten was against the bill.

All we wanted was for food made with genetically-modified organisms to be labeled as such.

Gloom and doom was to be our lot if it passed. All that processed garbage that sells crazy well in this state (and everywhere else) would have to be labeled.

Did you know that corn is technically listed as a pesticide by the FDA? Corn is officially a pesticide, and it's in nearly every single edible thing on the market, and if that edible thing is processed, it most assuredly has corn present.

Oh well. Times are changing. Labels will one day be labeled as they should be. If Washington and Colorado can decrim pot and Maryland joining the ranks of states that recognize rights of folks with the same plumbing wanting to call themselves "married", then someday we'll get where we we need to be.

Stupid scary Monsanto.

VOTE!

Maybe the system is jacked beyond repair.

Maybe we should start a revolution. Isn't that what all this "Occupy" bullshit's about? Like I said back in a post about the Occupy movement: we (the non-super wealthy) got screwed because the system allows us to get screwed---well, actually, no, it's designed for us to get screwed. That's how it is. Nobody studies or even pays attention to civic politics anymore, and that's how they want it.

Both of America's political parties want politics to be boring and infuriating. That way apathy creeps in, and while some folks may get upset about getting shafted, nobody's really going to get involved or expect it to get better. People simply can't imagine a world where politics is civil and out to do good for the people.

It can change by one of two ways. The first is really hard and takes a large amount of sacrifice, while the second is unimaginably harder and asks for a life-changing kind of sacrifice.

The first way is for people to take time to read up on the laws that are being submitted to vote while also keeping in contact with your elected representatives regularly. Calling them, writing them letters, showing up at their offices. Do you think if you and five of your family members, or friends, or acquaintances, or work buddies who share maybe a similar stance, were to show up at your state senator's office that person would be able to ignore you?

The first method means people must get informed. And that takes a whole lotta effort, believe me. One may think 1) there's not enough time in the day; or 2) that after a long day of work they just want to relax. To that, Method for Change 1 says: 1) turn off the television and get studying; and 2) tough shit.

Look, I'm not saying every day will be grind after grind while relaxation and rest fully evaporate, but that's realistically the kind of work involved in getting really informed and then holding people accountable when the system does the screwing.

The second method is revolution. And here I'm not talking standing-with-a-joint-in-one-hand-and-an-inflammatory-sign-in-the-other-while-chanting-in-unison kind of revolution. I'm talking the real kind.

The "we've devised a radical redistribution of resources" kind. The "time to lockup or technicolor-haircut every CEO from a Fortune 500 company" kind. Storming the castle with pitchforks and torches, baby!

And I'm down. I have ideas for that kind of revolution. What I don't have is an army...or a militia...or even a gun...or an angry mob...or even a country full of people who in their heart of hearts truly wants a revolution.

Is that really what you want? Me, I don't really have anything accept debt and a ton of blogs, so, like I said, I'm down.

And if you ever get your act together, come and get me. (I'm looking at you, you smelly oddly-mustachioed hipsters. The hippies will never fight, but you young hipsters, your world devalues humanity far more than preceding generations...)

So what do we do today? The first step to getting informed is to get involved, and getting involved means voting.

VOTE!

Time Change Conversations with Tuxedo

Daylight savings time is upon us, and it has someone in our household all out of sorts. That someone though, is our fuzzy feline, Tuxedo.

For people who aren't familiar with our cat, he has some peculiar habits that confound us to this day. As an eight year old cat, Tuxedo still, twice a day (and every single day for the last eight years) whines incessantly for his meals for at least an hour before each meal. "Whines" may not be the best word--screams and wails and howls and makes a goddamn racket may all work better.

He's a big cat, but his lungs and vocal chords are from some kind of banshee or howling beast.

After all this time, I've been able to tune him out, but it's not easy. There's simply no let up. But Tux's body clock is on solar time, while our schedule is on (mostly) artificial cell-phone time.

For breakfast, during the week, there is a high-pitched and shushy dance between Corrie and Tuxedo, and he gets fed right before she leaves. On the weekends, he's up right before her alarm would start to go off, and at first stirring he'll be an obnoxious beast until he gets food. Up until this past weekend, the alarm would start going off right around day break, meaning Tux would be anxious for grub right as the sun breaks the horizon, and then not getting fed until maybe forty-five minutes later, but definitely when the sun is up. Come weekends, he'll be starting at sunup.

One benefit to this is when an alarm fails, Tux acts like a fail-safe alarm.

But now, the old seven am is six, which gives us an extra hour to sleep. Tell that to the cat. He's up and obnoxious with the sun, which is kinda like his thing. When I started this blog back in Brooklyn, we didn't get any sun, so this wasn't really the same issue. He was obnoxious, of course, but not on the solar time schedule like now.

I thought cats were supposed to mellow out...silly me.

Desert Rift Lake: the Salton Sea

The Salton Sea is California's largest lake, averaging fifteen miles wide by thirty-five miles long. It's the topographically lowest point in the Salton Sink, a large depression that had for many millenia been a very large lake. The Salton Sea is brackish, or salty, more so than the Pacific, but less so than the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It's also a rift lake, that is, it's filling in the lowest points caused by a rift valley, or a fault-line.

Also, it was accidently formed. A flood built up a plug that blocked the water's escape, and in other times, the Sea of Cortez would have gone all the way to Coachella. Water flows in, and evaporation is its only outlet.

There was even a time when the Salton Sea was a resort, and folks would venture forth from both the Southland and the Bay Area. Now...

...now the salt water is so salty that boat's engines break down quickly, so boating's done with, and airplane travel became much more affordable, so Salton Sea, like Catalina, became less of a destination. Catalina, though, as an island, retains an exoticism that is absent out here in the desert.

It is a sight to see, though, when you drive towards it, out in the middle of the desert, a lake stretching off to the horizon and no opposing shore visible:

Our adventure began earlier that day, leaving our place in Long Beach and driving out the two hours to the middle of the desert. The blue water stretched off, and we turned left into a "neighborhood" that had signs signifying that it was called Shoreline Village. It was a large collection of double-wides. The odd thing, though, was that the trailers closest to the water were burned out and abandoned:

This is just the closest one. It doesn't seem to resemble a meth lab explosion, more like a regular fire, but I'm not a forensic expert:

Here's another wrecked out domicile:

And here all that's left is a ratty couch and the chimney:

Another place with the copper wires all stripped, but this one didn't really seem like a double-wide:

One more eerie shot before we head to the water's edge---a series of dead palms trees:

The beach was crunchy, like brittle fresh snow, but was made of fish bones and tiny puka-like shells:

Here's a cool scary shot of the sea and a love seat...

Okay, so, a few words about the Stench, and the tilapia die-off.

There was a cloud of funky smell that floated in on the greater LA area (we didn't get it in the LBC), and it was eventually determined that it was a Salton Sea fish die-off that had caused it. The die-offs are caused by large algae blooms that take up all the oxygen and choke out the fish. They happen regularly over the course of the sea's life.

Currently the salinity is a bigger problem than the algae blooms, beside the stench of the dead fish. The salinity's growing regularly due to the salinity levels in the feeder streams and rivers, though their salt levels should be a point of concern as well.

The edge of the sea had an odd foam, and it some parts you could see where the foam had dried after it was left during a tidal change.

At one point the beach had thousands of balls of fishy crud that was soft like dog droppings. I imagine it was the algae having been rolled through the lapping wave action over the shore, but I'm not sure, and this was as close as I came to handling it:

Dead fish:

There weren't any flies, and it seemed almost too salty to have any bacteria also (there had to be some, right?), and the fish just seemed to be drying out instead of decomposing.

At an old school dock the effect of long term salted air exposure was quite noticeable:

More fish piled up. The smell was nearly unbearable, which meant they had to be decomposing somewhat.

We stopped at another spot south of Shoreline Village called Western Shore. Google maps had said that it was actually called Salton City. A desolate intersection cracked me up: how would like to meet at the corner of Sea Elf and Treasure?

One last oddity: more funkiness...

And then there was us:

And a new pal, a retired Japanese doctor who took our picture, and couldn't get the birds to eat his bread (have you ever heard of that?):